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Today.

I wrote this many years ago on the invention of the "wealth creator", as one of the most important ideas in modern politics. gladstonediaries.blogspot.com/2014/02/repa...

Echoes here of Boris Johnson's call for Britons to offer "humble and hearty thanks" to the super-rich for their "concupiscent energy and sheer wealth-creating dynamism". www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07...

Any serious social-care plan will bring down the fires of hell from the Conservatives, Reform & much of the press, with endless headlines about "death taxes" & "dementia taxes". The only solution may be to get some beloved older celebrities to front a campaign, & call it "David's Law" or some such.

The front page of the Daily Telegraph, standing up for the real victims in modern Britain.

Some theories from the BBC... www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/68...

I'm surprised you don't think Scotland is in Europe.

Lovely story about the closest derby in British football: Cwmbran Town vs Cwmbran Celtic, whose grounds are 40 metres apart. "I don't know if Town are putting on a coach for their players..." www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

I feel obliged to tell you that I again have a tea-slurper behind me in the library - and this time, it's a young man! The slurp is not quite so drawn out as the previous lady, but it's accompanied by a great deal of blowing and sighing.

I'm guessing it was four letters...

Fellow historians: I regret to inform you that the fabulous British Newspaper Archive has changed its website and search facility. It is now impossible to find anything... (I suppose we'll get the hang of it eventually, as the dinosaur said of the asteroid).

Fires in France have now burned over 91,000 acres, by far the most of any year since the satellite record started in 2006. Current area burned is about 34x larger than this date in a typical (median) year:

It's noticeable, too, that there wasn't a single question on the climate, at a time when Europe is experiencing catastrophic wild-fires & record-breaking heat. It's astonishing how low down the political agenda this remains in Britain, when all the environmental indicators are signalling disaster.

Just watched the Burnham interview on Panorama. He handles it well, as you'd expect, & is good on welfare. But the problem is that Kuenssberg just isn't a very good interviewer. The questions are designed to trap, not to inform, so you don't really learn anything (except that he's better at this)

We're all just hitting "like" offline.

(Rees-Mogg did this so often in the Brexit years I used to call it "the Mogg Manoeuvre". He would hallucinate trade rules that even experts couldn't instantly refute, & by the time people had checked the relevant treaty it was all over. So I agree it's a problem; I just don't think LK can solve it).

More use of BBC Verify would be good, with that integrated directly into reporting on the website. That would also ensure that the next interviewer was primed to raise the issue & contest it. In other words, you can't stop the falsehood in the moment - but you can raise the costs of this tactic. /

TBH, I don't think it's realistic to expect a general interviewer to challenge curveball claims of fact in the moment. Few interviewers will have the knowledge to contest what was quite a complicated claim about exported emissions. The question is more what to do once the false claim is out there. /

But he is one of only two people in the last half century to be given a second go. I agree that this is unfortunate.

Andy Burnham, 21, writes to The Guardian in defence of Philip Larkin